Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher, Thomas’s program of research is most keenly focused on children’s and adolescent literature, the teaching of African American literature, and the role of race in English language arts classroom discourse and interaction. She is a 2014 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of the 2014 American Education Research Association’s Language and Social Processes SIG Emerging Scholar Award. Her forthcoming book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination in Youth Literature, Media, and Culture.

Amy Stornaiuolo is an assistant professor of literacy and education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines adolescents’ multimodal composing practices, teachers’ educational uses of digital technologies, and relationships between authors and audiences in online, networked spaces. She has received a number of awards for her research on composing in new media contexts, including the Promising Researcher Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Elva Knight award from the International Reading Association, and the Steve Cahir Early Career Award from the Writing and Literacies SIG at the American Educational Research Association. Stornaiuolo is the coeditor with Kathy Mills, Anna Smith, and Jessica Zacher Pandya of the forthcoming Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures (Routledge, 2017).